For $26 and an 8th Grade Education, You Can Hack a Voting Machine
Did you know that for just $26 and an 8th-grade education you can hack a
voting machine? This has actually been common knowledge for years,
since a study at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois developed a
hack to manipulate voting machines just before the 2012 elections.
The researchers who developed the hack were actually able to hijack a
Diebold Accuvote TS electronic voting machine, one of the most popular voting systems at the time.
Two of the lead researchers in the study were able to demonstrate a
number of different ways that voting machines could be hacked. They used
a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8, along
with a $15 remote control.
They demonstrated that the cheap hack worked from over a half-mile away.
“When the voter hits the ‘vote now’ button to register his votes, we
can blank the screen and then go back and vote differently and the voter
will be unaware that this has happened. Spend an extra four bucks and
get a better lock, you don’t have to have state-of-the-art security, but
you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to
get in,” Johnson said.
As far as how easy the hack is, Johnson
told Popsci that “I’ve been to high school science fairs where the kids
had more sophisticated microprocessor projects.”
